HONEY-GUIDES — FRIEDMANN 319 



Feeding Habits 



That fair numbers of honey-guides may occasionally gather to eat 

 at a single bees' nest is shown by an observation sent me by H. F. 

 Stoneham, who heard noises coming from one of his domestic beehives. 

 Thinking that a rat or some other creature was raiding the nest, he 

 went to it, and was surprised to see eight honey-guides fly out in rapid 

 succession, six greaters and two lessers. 



Kettlewell (1955, pp. 45-47) describes a nest of wild bees built in an 

 abandoned wrecked automobile, the metal of which became hot from 

 the sun and caused the honey inside to ferment. This apparently had 

 intoxicated a greater honey-guide, which Kettlewell pulled out of the 

 automobile. 



An addition to the known diet of the lesser honey-guide is reported 

 by van Someren (1956, p. 221), who saw one taking the young larvae 

 and pupae from the paper nest of an aculeate wasp. This recalls the 

 old observation of Butler, Feilden, and Reid (1882, p. 208) who 

 reported the greater honey-guide pecking at the comb of a wasp's 

 nest that had fallen to the ground. 



Chapin has recently sent me some observations on the feeding habits 

 of the least honey-guide, Indicator exilis, in the eastern Belgian Congo. 

 He opened an old bees' nest in which he found considerable quantities 

 of comb, practically empty of honey. The next day a least honey- 

 guide came to it, and again two days later he saw one there. He placed 

 a piece of the comb in a branch of a tall bush where he could watch it, 

 and the bird came there and ate pieces of the comb. The bird was 

 alone in each case, which fact seems to answer Chapin's (1939, p. 540) 

 earlier statement that since this species does not guide humans, it 

 may have some other mammalian symbiont. 



Chapin observed not only the least honey-guide feeding at open 

 bees' nests, but also his newly discovered pigmy honey-guide. Indicator 

 pumilio. In fact, most of his specimens of the latter were captured 

 with a butterfly net as they emerged from a beehive. 



Recently Verheyen (1957) has taken objection to my conclusion 

 that the primary interest of the honey-guides in bees' nests is the wax 

 of the comb rather than the honey, pollen, or bee larvae. It should be 

 pointed out that I have described that the birds do eat the bee larvae 

 and pupae, and, adventitiously, the honey, but it still remains that the 

 wax is the one substance they are most eager to get from the hive, and 

 the one substance they cannot obtain elsewhere. They are constantly 

 catching insects on the wing, and are certainly not primarily wax 

 feeders. As I pointed out, honey-guides grow to full size in their hosts' 

 nests without getting any wax in their food, but once they begin fend- 

 ing for themselves they eat wax avidly, not as a substitute for some 



